Christy Lebor of SmashBrand discusses ‘the head and the heart’ of brand strategy

“If a consumer does not know what the brand name is within a second, what you are really doing with your new product launch or new brand launch is you are building the category, [and] you are not building your brand, and that is a problem. In the beginning, it could be good, ... but as soon as you start to get a little bit of success, you are going to have copycats. You are going to have me-toos,” said Lebor on a recent episode of FoodNavigator-USA’s Founders’ Fundamental podcast.

​[Editor’s note: The Founders' Fundamentals podcast is FoodNavigator-USA’s monthly podcast series, dedicated to the art of building and growing CPG food and beverage brands. To listen to last month’s episode on product-market fit, click here.]

Balancing the head, the heart to create a brand for everyone

Having previously worked for CPG leaders like PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever, Lebor is now helping consult for emerging food and beverage companies on how best to build their brand with the right mix of easy-to-understand benefits and packaging design.

“Brands tend to go to one extreme or the other of the head and the heart. So, brands that over-index on the head ... [are] hyper-functional. It is almost too many claims,” Lebor noted.

Similarly, brands can over-index on brand imagery and aesthetics (i.e., the heart), making product benefits unclear, Lebor explained. In recent years, many companies developed design-heavy brands to attract Gen Z consumers, but in doing so, some have glossed over the product’s purpose, she added.

“Brands that are overly designed for Gen Z, I roll my eyes at because that entire design aesthetic does not work for 90% of the population, point one. Point two, that aesthetic that is being heralded as the new wave ... very much underdoes the head and overdoes the heart. It is overly design-led. You do not even know what the [product] is,” she elaborated.

She added, “We are consumables — fast-moving consumer goods — and you have to tell the consumer ... what [the product is and] get the category cues right. It should look like an ice cream if it is an ice cream. It should look like a coffee if it is a coffee. [Then], tell me why you are different and better.”

Lessons learned from launching water enhancer brand Mio

While package design is important, startups should also consider the art and format of the boxes that they ship their product, Lebor said.

During her tenure at Kraft Heinz, Lebor worked on launching the water enhancer brand Mio and saw first-hand challenges in retailers’ merchandising of the product. Retailers were concerned the product would fall off the shelf given the shape or be unseen by consumers since the water enhancer category was still nascent, Lebor explained.

“You focus so much on that primary pack — and you should — but always remember to think about the format of your structure and whether or not you really need to have what is often called a display-ready case or a display-ready shipper,” Lebor elaborated.

The convenience-store (c-store) channel also proved difficult for Mio during its early days, as inventory would often not make it onto shelves and get lost in the back room of c-stores, Lebor said. Kraft Heinz added brand art and additional callouts to specific flavors on the boxes to the shipper case, she added.

[Changing the boxes] alleviated the problem, and we were back in stock, and our sales went up 50% just because it was on the shelf in c-stores because now the store associates could find it,” she noted.